Speech recognition technologies allow computers and other electronic devices equipped with a source of sound input, such as a microphone, to interpret human speech, e.g., for transcription or as an alternative method of interacting with a computer. Speech recognition software is being developed for use in consumer electronic devices such as mobile telephones, game platforms, personal computers and personal digital assistants. In a typical speech recognition algorithm, a time domain signal representing human speech is broken into a number of time windows and each window is converted to a frequency domain signal, e.g., by fast Fourier transform (FFT). This frequency or spectral domain signal is then compressed by taking a logarithm of the spectral domain signal and then performing another FFT. From the compressed signal, a statistical model can be used to determine phonemes and context within the speech represented by the signal.
Speech recognition systems often use a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to determine the units of speech in a given speech signal. The speech units may be words, two-word combinations or sub-word units, such as phonemes and the like. The HMM is characterized by:
L, which represents a number of possible states of the system;
M, which represents the total number of Gaussians that exist in the system;
N, which represents the number of distinct observable features at a given time; these features may be spectral (i.e., frequency domain) or temporal (time domain) features of the speech signal;
A={aij}, a state transition probability distribution, where each aij represents the probability that the system will transition to the jth state at time t+1 if the system is initially in the ith state at time t;
B={bj(k)}, an observation feature probability distribution for the jth state, where each bj(k) represents the probability distribution for observed values of the kth feature when the system is in the jth state; and
π={πi}, an initial state distribution, where each component πi represents the probability that the system will be in the ith state at some initial time.
Hidden Markov Models can solve three basic problems of interest in real world applications, such as speech recognition: (1) Given a sequence of observations of a system, how can one efficiently compute the probability of the observation sequence; (2) given the observation sequence, what corresponding state sequence best explains the observation sequence; and (3) how can one adjust the set of model parameters A, B π to maximize the probability of a given observation sequence.
The application of HMMs to speech recognition is described in detail, e.g., by Lawrence Rabiner in “A Tutorial on Hidden Markov Models and Selected Applications in Speech Recognition” in Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 77, No. 2, February 1989, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety for all purposes. Real-world processes generally produce observable outputs which can be characterized as signals. The signals can be discrete in nature (e.g., characters from a finite alphabet, quantized vectors from a codebook, etc.), or continuous in nature (e.g., speech samples, temperature measurements, music, etc.). The signal source can be stationary (i.e., its statistical properties do not vary with time), or nonstationary (i.e., the signal properties vary over time). The signals can be pure (i.e., coming strictly from a single source), or can be corrupted from other signal sources (e.g., noise) or by transmission distortions, reverberation, etc. Human speech can be characterized by a number of recognizable patterns known as phonemes. Each of these phonemes can be broken down in a number of parts, e.g., a beginning, middle and ending part. It is noted that the middle part is typically the most stable since the beginning part is often affected by the preceding phoneme and the ending part is affected by the following phoneme. The different parts of the phonemes are characterized by frequency domain features that can be recognized by appropriate statistical analysis of the signal. The statistical model often uses Gaussian probability distribution functions to predict the probability for each different state of the features that make up portions of the signal that correspond to different parts of different phonemes. One HMM state can contain one or more Gaussians. A particular Gaussian for a given possible state, e.g., the kth Gaussian can be represented by a set of N mean values μki and variances σki. In a typical speech recognition algorithm one determines which of the Gaussians for a given time window is the largest one. From the largest Gaussian one can infer the most probable phoneme for the time window.
In typical speech recognition software, each mean and variance for each Gaussian is represented by a 32-bit floating point number. Since there may be a large number of different possible Gaussians, the determination of the most probable state may involve calculations involving between several hundred and several thousand Gaussians. A significant number of floating point operations must be performed on each Gaussian during the speech recognition algorithm, and the correspondingly large number of 32-bit parameters leads to a considerable demand on the available memory of the computer or other signal processing device that performs the speech recognition. It would be desirable to perform the Gaussian computations in a way that reduces that demand on available memory without sacrificing recognition accuracy.